Three Men in a Boat assessment – quirky novella makes for perky, fun-forward theatre | Theatre

Back from Lib Dem convention, Ed Davey watched this adaptation in his Kingston constituency of Jerome Ok Jerome’s novella a few trio of late Victorian gents rowing the Thames accompanied by fox terrier Montmorency. Might the up-for-fun politician instantly drop on to the stage in a Scooby-Doo go well with?

He didn’t, though Christopher Haydon’s perky manufacturing options one actor making an applause-winning entrance from an unbelievable location. This model can also be actually extra liberal and democratic than the 1889 textual content whose language has typically dated in that means or propriety.

Bronté Barbé performs, with false moustache and decrease voice notes, the eccentric Harris who, with lugubrious George (Richard David-Caine), joins pompous hypochondriac Jerome (Jonny Weldon) on a river journey that begins from Kingston. As with all quirky, discursive books, the problem of adaptation is imposing momentum and pressure. Al Smith’s dramatisation neatly juggles chronology (the sixth chapter is his first scene) and anchors the e-book’s greatest set items (swan assault, putrid cheese, a homicide investigation) in a brand new narrative the place the blokes are heading to Oxford for Harris’s marriage ceremony, his selection of greatest man a bugbear.

Three Men in a Boat has come to signify an idyllic, witty misplaced England. Tom Stoppard, an immigrant ecstatic to have landed right here, wrote a 1975 BBC adaptation in that spirit. But the e-book has darker meditations on faith, society and dying. Smith makes George, initially a bachelor banker, a physician who has been just lately widowed, with a boldly bleak monologue about bereavement that’s presumably a tonal surrogate for an incident within the unique, not dramatised, the place the boaters spot a floating corpse.

Otherwise, the present foregrounds jauntiness. Montmorency, a menace to ankles, cats and different canines within the e-book, is right here an enthralling pet rag puppet (animated by Calum Donald-Bruce), a theatrical machine now so acquainted that it prompts in-jokes: “We’ll have to eat the puppeteer!”

The 135-minute present is punctuated by eight musical numbers and, although it’s now nearly compulsory for traditional literature to be sung and danced (the newest sufferer Jane Eyre), this can be a logical candidate. The e-book consists of references to Gilbert and Sullivan, opera, music corridor, banjos, bagpipes and accordions. Grant Olding’s songs incorporate all, together with a biographical patter quantity about Jerome, an Italianate aria for the reeking cheese and a Tchaikovsky ballet pastiche (choreographed by Simon Hardwick) when the journey reaches swan river.

That sequence and others justify the poster for the present which, referencing Magritte and Dalí, suggests the story is surrealist. But slapstick dominates in an attractive night that smooths the jagged oddness of the e-book.